A creative fighting tactic useful by unarmed people in any situation: Make what's around you a weapon. Even outside the dangerous environments, there's a lot of stuff to try. Anything can be used as a club if it's sturdy enough, and most stuff will develop a sharp edge if properly coaxed. For comedy value, go as wacky as you like.

Prison - Real knives are hard to get and quickly confiscated. So convicts improvise a lot. All of the above is used, with the addition of mirror glass, plastic bags, elastic bands, gum, toothbrushes, and many, many other things. Notably, ingenious inmates have been known to make usable shivs out of papier-mache toilet paper (you can literally flush the evidence), a shotgun out of bedposts (which was used to blow out a pane of bulletproof glass before they held a guard hostage), and best of all, a fully functioning crossbow (the components included rubber gloves, a wire coathanger, and ten toothbrushes).

At the store — Fresh produce, pop caps, anything in a can or glass bottle, cash registers, depending on the store TVs, furniture, VCRs, heavy electronics, candy balls, toys. The Home and Garden and Hardware departments are veritable arsenals of melee weapons. Bee Spray makes a great alternative to mace and can shoot 15+ feet in a wide swath.

Car Fu. Slow or fast, as long as it's undodgeable, it's quite dangerous.

Anywhere in your own home - cameras (those flash bulbs are always a handy distraction), the couch, the golf caddy, pet cages (especially if Fido or Fluffy is inside), the indoor fireplace (HOT HOT HOOOOT!!!), or towels, blankets, and curtains. The flashlight at the garage is also useful both as a blinding light and as a club. Hoses are useful with or without a water stream. Also beware anyone who shouts, "Batter Up!"

More and more video games, especially those with Ragdoll Physics, allow the use of environment items as a weapon. Even in early Brawlers, it was a very useful tactic.

Example subpages

In The Mouse of Konoha, always being prepared this is one of the three shinobi lessons Naruto learns when he starts trading scavenged weaponry for tutelage.

The protagonist of Toy Hammer is an artist with no combat training whatsoever, but when he needs to put out a fire, he subsequently discovers that the extinguisher works as both a bludgeon and (when sprayed) a stunning weapon. He wields it in almost every fight, to the point that it becomes a part of his mental landscape for more than one Battle in the Center of the Mind.

In With Strings Attached, Ringo whacks Grynun over the head with a guitar to prevent her from castrating George.

In The Eye of Argon, Grignr sharpens the pelvic bone of a rat and slashes one of the guards with it during his escape.

Also, the chase scene at the supermarket earlier. The second arms’ dealer is running away and Bond would need a car to catch up, but he doesn’t have one. So what does he do? He picks up a shopping trolley and rides it downwards to catch up while staring directly at the camera as the Bond music is played out loud. This is Played for Laughs taken Up to Eleven.

Terrorists throwing empty boxes at Bond, which he catches and throws back even as they both have guns.

In Forward, during a fight inside an infirmary, Jayne kills an opponent who is strangling him (and wearing low-profile Power Armor) by braining him with a bedpan and cutting his throat with a scalpel. Jayne improvising weapons is something he keeps doing over the course of the story as well; in his flashback to when six men tried to kill him, he ends up taking out one of them by rigging a massive incendiary bomb using gasoline and small explosives. Also, the whole crew ends up improvising an anti-ship missile out of a disused drone, shuttle engines, and a repurposed flight computer.

In Crowns of the Kingdom, the Disney Princesses storm the Matterhorn to rescue their boyfriends armed with sports equipment and kitchen utensils.

In Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic Prison Island Break, Shadow is highly skilled at creating shivs out of anything. Not only that, but he carries multiple shivs at all times, and the guards rarely manage to confisticate them all after a shakedown.

In Not In Kansas, Kara accidentally slays a vampire with a house. More accurately, she tried to force it into said house without first inviting it in, slaying it and leaving behind a pile of dust (which Kara noted didn't enter the house either).

The main characters of FREAKIN GENSOKYO fight primarily with scissors and plant hangers. These later turn out to be viable melee weapon classes, with dozens of enchanted variants available for the collector.

In Doctor Steel's song, "Lament for a Toy Factory", Steel goes insane after being fired by a toy factory. He invades the factory with an army of toys and gasoline-filled Super Soakers.

In Kevin "Bloody" Wilson's song about The Front Bar Featherbrain Non-Title Fight, a pool cue, broken off pool table legs and a toilet are all employed.

The video clip for Operator Please's "Leave It Alone" sees this happen right near the end of an otherwise regular fistfight in a small warehouse (well, regular save for the paint in place of blood). Tim Commandeur uses his cymbals (taking an hand and a foot) and a drumstick (taking an eye) until his arms are ripped off by Amandah Wilkinson. Taylor Henderson ends the fight using her violin like a bow and arrow.

In Broken Saints, Raimi defeats a deranged Kamimura by picking up a mirror off the ground in the alleyway and smashing it over his head.

Tifa in Dead Fantasy. Hold on this might take a while... Ether bottles, bits of lava stuck to her shoes, a table, a garage jack, the same garage jack cut in half, and lastly the chains that where used to try and restrain her.

Volume 2, Episode 1of RWBY had Teams RWBY and JNPR utilize various foodstuffs as analogues for their traditional weapons. Nora uses a watermelon on a pole, Yang uses turkeys as gauntlets, Pyrrha uses a baguette as a spear, Weiss uses a swordfish, and… stop laughing!

Flippy from Happy Tree Friends has a knack for this when he's not using his bowie knife. His list of killing methods includes stabbing someone through the heart with a drinking straw, stabbing someone through the head with a rose, and even disemboweling someone with a christmas cookie.

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